A Family Teatime Tradition

A little behind-the-scene look (I am really beginning to like this sort of thing):
This is one of those writings that I wasn’t not really planning on doing, but somehow it happened. When I first came to know of an ongoing prompt at Write Tribe about using 6 body part idioms, I was quite sure that this was not my cup of tea. I couldn’t see myself using an idiom-filled expression, that is just not me I thought. But somehow a few days later came this little idea from somewhere which somehow didn’t mind expressing itself through an idiom-filled language. And there you have it…

I feel like I am back in my English class in middle school, but it is fun being back there. I enjoyed my English classes 🙂

The two often didn’t see eye to eye on many things.

Most of the mornings during their teatime on the veranda…

…she would tell her that real world of business was not what was taught in the management schools. One has to learn by experience how the game is played, learn the rules of the game, and then also learn how and when to break the rules. This, she would say, was the only way to keep moving up.

…she would tell her about those hard times when she got a real kick in the teeth, and that too from colleagues she thought were on her side.

…she would tell her about an important lesson she had learned in her 20+ years in the world of big business – one must always walk with an ear glued to the ground so as not to be caught unaware.

…she would tell her that sometimes the best thing to do in some pesky situations at workplace was simply to do nothing or drag one’s feet at the most.

…she would tell her to protect her self-interest at all cost and not get involved in things like personality clashes and inter-personal conflicts, because while the clever ones get away unharmed it is generally the more idealistic ones who end up with egg on their face in such situations.

She knew her words often went unheard. Deep in her heart she didn’t mind being ignored. But still she had to speak of those things…

And today her daughter was forced to resign from her job after just a few months, because she wouldn’t let go of her idealism. “Like father, like daughter,” she mumbled as she kept her phone down and got ready for her next meeting. As a senior vice president in the same company, she couldn’t let a silly thing like idealism come in the way of her upcoming promotion. Even if it was her daughter’s idealism.

That night when she reached home after 11 and saw her 23-year-old daughter sleeping soundly as if nothing is wrong with the world, she had a gut feeling that all would be well with her child. She closed gently the half-open book ‘Management by Consciousness’ resting on her daughter’s quilt, kept it on the bedside table and switched off the light. And she smiled at her dead husband’s picture in her room, mumbled “like father, like daughter” and picked up her laptop for a video-call to the US.

She and he too could not see eye to eye on many things, her mind wandered to those morning teatime conversations with her husband as she waited for others to join the call.

“The pragmatic intellect is only sure of a thing when it ﬁnds it realised in Power; therefore it has a certain contempt for the ideal, for the vision, because it drives always at execution and material realisation. But Power is not the only term of the Godhead; Knowledge is the elder sister of Power…”